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My name is Ben Adida. I am 36, married, two kids, working in Silicon Valley as a software engineer with a strong background in security. I’ve worked on the security of voting systems and health systems, on web browsers and payment systems. I enthusiastically voted for you three times: in the 2008 primary and in both presidential elections. When I wrote about my support for your campaign five years ago, I said:

In his campaign, Obama has proposed opening up to the public all bill debates and negotiations with lobbyists, via TV and the Internet. Why? Because he trusts that Americans, when given the tools to see and understand what their legislators are doing, will apply pressure to keep their government honest.

I gushed about how you supported transparency as broadly as possible, to enable better decision making, to empower individuals, and to build a better nation.

Now, I’m no stubborn idealist. I know that change is hard and slow. I know you cannot steer a ship as big as the United States as quickly as some would like. I know tough compromises are the inevitable path to progress.

I also imagine that, once you’re President, the enormity of the threat from those who would attack Americans must be overwhelming. The responsibility you feel, the level of detail you understand, must make prior principles sometimes feel quaint. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be in your shoes.

I also remember that you called on us, your supporters, to stay active, to call you and Congress to task. I want to believe that you asked for this because you knew that your perspective as Commander in Chief would inevitably become skewed. So this is what I’m doing here: I’m calling you to task.

You are failing hard on transparency and oversight when it comes to NSA surveillance. This failure is not the pragmatic compromise of Obamacare, which I strongly support. It is not the sheer difficulty of closing Guantanamo, which I understand. This failure is deep. If you fail to fix it, you will be the President principally responsible for the effective death of the Fourth Amendment and worse.

mass surveillance

The specific topic of concern, to be clear, is mass surveillance. I am not concerned with targeted data requests, based on probable cause and reviewed individually by publicly accountable judges. I can even live with secret data requests, provided they’re very limited, finely targeted, and protect the free-speech rights of service providers like Google and Facebook to release appropriately sanitized data about these requests as often as they’d like.

What I’m concerned about is the broad, dragnet NSA signals intelligence recently revealed by Edward Snowden. This kind of surveillance is a different beast, comparable to routine frisking of every individual simply for walking down the street. It is repulsive to me. It should be repulsive to you, too.

wrong in practice

If you’re a hypochondriac, you might be tempted to ask your doctor for a full body MRI or CT scan to catch health issues before detectable symptoms. Unfortunately, because of two simple probabilistic principles, you’re much worse off if you get the test.

First, it is relatively unlikely that a random person with no symptoms has a serious medical problem, ie the prior probability is low. Second, it is quite possible — not likely, but possible — that a completely benign thing appears potentially dangerous on imaging, ie there is a noticeable chance of false positive. Put those two things together, and you get this mind-bending outcome: if the full-body MRI says you have something to worry about, you actually don’t have anything to worry about. But try convincing yourself of that if you get a scary MRI result.

Mass surveillance to seek out terrorism is basically the same thing: very low prior probability that any given person is a terrorist, quite possible that normal behavior appears suspicious. Mass surveillance means wasting tremendous resources on dead ends. And because we’re human and we make mistakes when given bad data, mass surveillance sometimes means badly hurting innocent people, like Jean-Charles de Menezes.

So what happens when a massively funded effort has frustratingly poor outcomes? You get scope creep: the surveillance apparatus gets redirected to other purposes. The TSA starts overseeing sporting events. The DEA and IRS dip into the NSA dataset. Anti-terrorism laws with far-reaching powers are used to intimidate journalists and their loved ones.

Where does it stop? If we forgo due process for a certain category of investigation which, by design, will see its scope broaden to just about any type of investigation, is there any due process left?

wrong on principle

I can imagine some people, maybe some of your trusted advisors, will say that what I’ve just described is simply a “poor implementation” of surveillance, that the NSA does a much better job. So it’s worth asking: assuming we can perfect a surveillance system with zero false positives, is it then okay to live in a society that implements such surveillance and detects any illegal act?

This has always felt wrong to me, but I couldn’t express a simple, principled, ethical reason for this feeling, until I spoke with a colleague recently who said it better than I ever could:

For society to progress, individuals must be able to experiment very close to the limit of the law and sometimes cross into illegality. A society which perfectly enforces its laws is one that cannot make progress.

What would have become of the civil rights movement if all of its initial transgressions had been perfectly detected and punished? What about gay rights? Women’s rights? Is there even room for civil disobedience?

Though we want our laws to reflect morality, they are, at best, a very rough and sometimes completely broken approximation of morality. Our ability as citizens to occasionally transgress the law is the force that brings our society’s laws closer to our moral ideals. We should reject mass surveillance, even the theoretically perfect kind, with all the strength and fury of a people striving to form a more perfect union.

patriots

Mr. President, you have said that you do not consider Edward Snowden a patriot, and you have not commented on whether he is a whistleblower. I ask you to consider this: if you were an ordinary citizen, living your life as a Law Professor at the University of Chicago, and you found out, through Edward Snowden’s revelations, the scope of the NSA mass surveillance program and the misuse of the accumulated data by the DEA and the IRS, what would you think? Wouldn’t you, like many of us, be thankful that Mr. Snowden risked his life to give we the people this information, so that we may judge for ourselves whether this is the society we want?

And if there is even a possibility that you would feel this way, given that many thousands do, if government insiders believe Snowden to be a traitor while outsiders believe him to be a whisteblower, is that not all the information you need to realize the critical positive role he has played, and the need for the government to change?

the time to do something is now

I still believe that you are, at your core, a unique President who values a government by and for the people. As a continuing supporter of your Presidency, I implore you to look deeply at this issue, to bring in outside experts who are not involved in national security. This issue is critical to our future as a free nation.

Please do what is right so that your daughters and my sons can grow up with the privacy and dignity they deserve, free from surveillance, its inevitable abuses, and its paralyzing force. Our kids, too, will have civil rights battles to fight. They, too, will need the ability to challenge unjust laws. They, too, will need the space to make our country better still.

Security is hard. I don’t mean that you have to work really hard to do the right thing, I mean that “the right thing” is far from obvious. What are you defending against? Does your solution provide increased security in a real-world setting, not just in theory? Have you factored in usability? Is it security theater? And is security theater necessarily a bad thing?

These are subtle discussions. Let’s discuss openly and respectfully. Let’s ask questions, understand threat model differences, and contribute to improving security for real. In particular, let’s take into account typical user behavior, which can easily negate the very best security in favor of convenience.

Let’s talk examples.

writing your passwords down

Recently, I had to create a brand new complicated password. I pulled out a sheet of paper, thought of a password, wrote it down, and put the piece of paper in my wallet. Someone said to me “did you just write that password down?” I said yes. The snarky response came back: “you should never write passwords down.” Maybe you’ve said this yourself, to a relative, friend, or co-worker?

Except it’s not that simple. Bruce Schneier recommends writing down your passwords so you’re not tempted to use one that’s too simple in order to remember it. Oftentimes, you should be more worried about the remote network attacker than people who have physical access to your machine.

But don’t feel bad about it. You’re not stupid for telling your poor aging parents to pick long impossible-to-remember passwords and then never write them down. That’s what many experts said for years. This stuff is hard. It’s worth discussing, exploring, and finding the appropriate balance of security and convenience for the application at hand. The answer won’t be the same for everyone and everything.

Google Chrome passwords

Yes, it’s true, you can, in a few seconds, view in cleartext all the passwords saved within a Google Chrome browser. But did you know you can do it in Firefox and Safari, too? With just about the same number of clicks? Are you having second thoughts about your immediate gut reaction of pure disgust at Chrome’s apparent sloppiness?

There are good reasons why you might legitimately want to read your passwords out of your browser. Most of the time, if you give your computer to someone you don’t trust, you’re kind of screwed anyways. But it’s subtle. It’s not quite the same thing to have access to your computer for a few minutes and to actually have your password. In the first case, someone can mess with your Facebook profile for a few seconds. In the second, they can get your password and log in as you on a different machine, wreaking havoc on your life for an extended period of time. So maybe it’s worth a discussion, maybe you can’t play security reductionism. Maybe the UI to view your passwords shouldn’t exist.

Would that then be security theater, since, as Adrienne Felt points out, you can install an extension that opens up a bunch of tabs and lets the password manager auto-fill them all, then steals the actual passwords? Maybe. It’s worth a discussion. In fact I like the discussion Adrienne, Joe, and I are having: it’s respectful and balanced, though limited by Twitter.

Is this fixed by Firefox’s Master Password? Sort of, if you believe that addressing the problem for a tiny percentage of the population is a “solution,” and if you assume those users will know to quit their browser every time they leave their computer unattended. Still, it’s worth pointing out the Master Password solution and evaluating its real-world efficacy.

Disabling Javascript in Firefox

As of version 23, Firefox has removed the user interface that lets a user turn off Javascript, and some folks call that lame. Why is Firefox removing user choice?

OK, so let’s consider the average Web user. Do they know what “disabling Javascript” does? If they do, is it much harder for them to use an add-on like NoScript? If they don’t, what is the benefit of offering that option, knowing that too many options is always a bad thing? Some people believe Javascript is so integral to the modern Web that disabling it is as sensible as disabling images, iframes, or the audio tag. Others believe the Web should always gracefully degrade and be fully functional without Javascript.

This is a very reasonable discussion to have. The answer isn’t obvious. My opinion is that Javascript is part of the modern Web, giving users a blunt “disable Javascript” button is practically useless, and add-ons are a fine path if you want to surf the Web with one hand tied behind your back. I have no beef with anyone who disagrees with me. I do have a beef with people who call this decision obviously stupid and see only downsides.

The Web is not that simple. Security is not that simple. And people, most importantly, are not that simple.

Let’s build a better way to discuss security. Never disrespectful, always curious. That’s how we improve security for everyone.

In about a month, I’ll be starting at Square as a Tech Lead on a new project. I’m incredibly excited for a few key reasons:

team: oodles of amazingly sharp people. The interview process was simply amazing, both in how much it forced me to demonstrate as an engineer and in how much I learned about the existing team. I know I’m going to learn a ton. It’s also really nice to see Square’s engineering team contributing significant open-source code.

product: it’s hard to think of a more product-focused company. The Square products (Register, Wallet, Cash, Market) are amazing. The focus on user experience is central to every conversation, and it shows.

mission: Square wants to make commerce easy for businesses of all sizes. This translates in particular into major opportunities for small businesses. And this, in my mind, is what technology is for: to empower the little guys.

For the first time in a long time, my job will require a bit of secrecy. That will be an interesting adjustment for me. On this blog, I’ll continue to write what I think — not what my employer thinks — about technology, policy, etc.

Today is my last day at Mozilla. It’s been an amazing ride, and I’m incredibly proud of the Identity Team and of the work we produced together, notably Persona. The team and project are now in the incredibly capable hands of my friend Lloyd Hilaiel. I expect to see continued fantastic work from this team, and I’ll miss everyone dearly. Mozilla is a special place, and I’m grateful I had the chance to experience it firsthand.

I’ll be taking a break for a few weeks. You might see me on this blog and on Twitter from time to time, and I might even tend to Helios Voting a little bit, which has gotten far too little love from me lately. But mostly, I’ll be reading, relaxing, spending time with family. I’m excited about what comes next, and I’ll talk about that more in a few days.

US government agencies appear to be engaged in large-scale Internet surveillance, using secret court orders to force major Internet companies to provide assistance. The extent of this assistance is a topic of debate. What’s clear, though, is that the process itself is opaque: it’s impossible to know how broad or inappropriate the surveillance may be.

OK, so what do we do about it?

told you so, never shoulda trusted the Cloud

Some folks see this as vindication: we never should have trusted the Cloud. Only trust yourself, generate your own keypairs, encrypt all traffic, host your own email, etc. Servers are evil and should be considered leaky stupid passthroughs for fully encrypted data.

First, this is naive. If government agencies believe they have the authority to monitor all Internet traffic, would they hesitate to create viruses that infect and monitor endpoints? Would they hesitate to force software and hardware vendors to build secret backdoors into their products? It is the engineer’s mistake to believe that Law Enforcement will stop cleanly at technical abstraction layers. If the goal is total surveillance, the financial means immense, the arm-twisting strength unlimited, the oversight inexistent.. what would you do in their position?

Second, if, like me, you agree that technology experts have a duty to build solutions that matter to laypeople, it’s also irresponsible. None of these paranoid solutions are accessible to laypeople. Can you imagine Grandpa with his fingerprint-activated USB-key holding his RSA-2048-bit secret key and surfing the Web via Tor proclaiming “not me, I will fight the man!” Yeah. (And if you’re thinking “no Grandpa, not RSA! Elliptic curves!” well, thank you for making my point for me.)

So enough with this la-la land of users as fortified islands communicating via torpedo-proof-ciphertext-carrying submarines. People engage with others by way of intermediaries they trust, for that is the basis of all human interaction and commerce since the dawn of time. Let us build systems, both technical and legal, that start there.

protect user data wherever it lives

We can build systems that start with respect for the user and her data, wherever it lives. On Facebook servers, on Google servers, on self-hosted servers, on private computers. Encrypted or not encrypted. We can and should use cryptography to secure channels from those who would disrespect user data, reduce data collection to that which is useful, and generally build defense in depth against bad actors. We should stop wasting time on systems that impose the resulting complexity on users. Government access to user data should follow a clear, transparent process that is consistent wherever the data happens to be stored, however it happens to be encrypted.

Let’s build that system together. Not by barricading ourselves on our lonely islands of encryption and onion-routing. But by building the legal and technical framework we need to respect users and their data. Mozilla and Google have started. I’m hopeful many more will join.

You know what? I’m feeling optimistic suddenly. Mere hours ago, all of us tech/policy geeks lost our marbles over PRISM. And in the last hour, we’ve got two of the most strongly worded surveillance rebuttals I’ve ever seen from major Internet Companies.

we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday.

Both companies emphasize government data requests transparency as a critical component of moving forward. I couldn’t agree more. We need to know about every legal process in place that gives government access to private user data.

epiphany?

Could PRISM mark a tech world epiphany that users care about privacy? I hope so. It certainly seems that major PR departments think so. 24-hour unequivocally worded responses from major Internet CEOs means they care. This is a good thing.

retreat is the wrong reaction

I’ve heard folks argue that PRISM means we need to bet it all on end-to-end encryption. I think that’s wrong, because that doesn’t fulfill users’ needs. But even putting that aside: if you believe the government is willing to penetrate professionally managed corporate servers without company permission or legal clarity, do you sincerely believe the government wouldn’t also penetrate your personal computer and steal the data before you encrypt it?

Services and data aggregation play a critical role in providing users the features they need to share, discover, and grow. They’re not going away. Don’t expect PRISM to herald the era of end-to-end encryption and dumb servers. Those will continue to play only a limited role for very specific use cases.

What we need is (1) companies that deeply respect users, and (2) legal processes that protect user data wherever it lives. I think we’re seeing the beginning of (1). Now, Obama, over to you for (2).

Heard about PRISM? Supposedly, the NSA has direct access to servers at major Internet companies. This has happened before, e.g. when Sprint provided law enforcement a simple data portal they could use at any time. They used it 8 million times in a year. That said, the scale of this new claim is a bit staggering. If the NSA has access to these 9 companies’ data, it has access to every American Citizen’s complete life.

what’s really happening?

I think we don’t know yet what’s happening.

I’m dubious that NSA has direct access to servers at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. Those companies have strongly denied the claim, and I have trouble believing this happened on a large scale for years without someone at those companies leaking the information.

Might NSA be tapping all network traffic? Yeah, that’s probable. Might NSA have the facility to decrypt the encrypted traffic? For targeted searches, yeah, I believe that. For broad-scale searching across all traffic? I’m not so sure. It could be happening, but that would be tremendous, hard-to-fathom news.

I could be wrong here. Companies might be cooperating and lying about it. NSA might be eons ahead of what we expect in terms of computing capability and cryptographic breakthroughs. This is just my gut instinct.

is this okay?

So, let’s assume it is happening. Is it okay? Hell no it isn’t. There is no doubt in my mind that user data, whether stored in a lockbox in my home or on a server in Oregon, should first and foremost belong to me, and be covered by the same Constitutional protections as my home and private belongings. It is high time for the law to catch up, for a digital due process. Blanket surveillance, warrantless private data capture or seizure, are unacceptable, and should be revolting to anyone who cares about freedom and democracy.

lessons for technologists

I deeply believe that one should first look at one’s own actions before blaming others. And I think we, technologists, have some blame to shoulder.

We’ve let our guard down when it comes to user data ownership. We’ve made it increasingly acceptable to collect user data and make decisions about how best to use it without involving the user much. We’ve often allowed the definition of “using data for the user’s benefit” to loosen.

In other words, where user data ownership in the cloud was murky to begin with, we’ve made it murkier.

But we can take a stronger stance against companies that abuse users’ trust and treat the data as their own rather than the user’s. We can set an example. We can state clearly that when we collect data, we do it with care, we do it for a clear purpose, and we allow the user to leave as easily as possible, removing traces of their data as best we can.

We can set the example that the user’s data, whatever server it’s on, belongs, by principle, to the user. And then we can and should ask our government to live up to the same standard.

My team at Mozilla works on Persona, an easy and secure web login solution. Persona delivers to web sites and apps just the right information for a meaningful login: an email address of the user’s choice. Persona is one of Mozilla’s first forays “up the stack” into web services.

Typically, at Mozilla, we improve the Web by way of Firefox, our major lever with hundreds of millions of users. Take asm.js, Firefox’s new awesome JavaScript optimization technology which lets you run 60-frame-per-seconds games in your web browser. It’s such a great thing that Chrome is fast-following. Of course, Chrome also innovates by deploying features first, and Firefox often fast-follows. Standardization ensues. The Web wins.

With Identity, we’ve taken a different approach: out of the gate, Persona works on all modern browsers, desktop and mobile, and some not-so-modern browsers like IE8 and Android 2.2 stock. We’re not simply building open specs for others to build against: we are putting in the time and effort to make Persona work everywhere. We even have iOS and Android native SDKs in the works.

Why would we do such a thing? Aren’t we helping to improve our competitors’ platforms instead of improving our own? That reasoning, though tempting, is misguided. Here’s why.

working on all modern platforms is table-stakes

We talk about Persona to Web developers all the time. We almost always get the following two questions:

does this work in other browsers?

does this work on mobile?

These questions are actually all-or-nothing: either Persona works on other browsers and on mobile, or, developers tell us, they won’t adopt it. To date, we have not found a single web site that would deploy a Firefox-only authentication system. Some web sites have adopted Persona, only to back out once they built an iOS app and couldn’t use Persona effectively (we’re actively fixing that.) So, grand theories aside, we’re targeting all platforms because web sites simply won’t adopt Persona otherwise. After all, Facebook Connect works everywhere.

When you think about it, is that actually so different from the asm.js strategy? asm.js is much faster on Firefox, but it works on Chrome and any other JavaScript engine, too. Heck, even Google’s DART, a brand new language they want to see browsers adopt, comes with a DART-to-JavaScript-compiler so it works on all other browsers out of the gate. These are not after-thoughts. These are not small investments. asm.js was designed as a proper subset of JavaScript. The DART-to-JS compiler is a freaking compiler, built just so non-Chrome browsers can run DART.

When appealing to web developers to make a significant investment — rewriting code, building against a new authentication system, .. —, cross-browser and cross-device functionality from day 1 is table-stakes. The alternative is not reduced adoption, it’s zero adoption.

priming users is the winning hand

The similarities between Identity and purely functional improvements like asm.js stop when it comes to users. The reason web sites choose Facebook Connect is not just because it works, but because 1 Billion users are primed with accounts and ready to log in. Same goes for Google+ and Twitter logins.

Persona doesn’t have a gigantic userbase to start from. That sucks. The good news is that, unlike other identity systems, we don’t want to create a huge silo’ed userbase. What we want is a protocol and a user-experience that make Web logins better. We want users to choose their identity. We’re happy to bridge to existing userbases to help them do just that!

So, bridging is what we’re doing. You’ve seen it already with Yahoo Identity Bridging in Persona Beta 2. More is coming. With each bridge, hundreds of millions of additional users are primed to log in with Persona. That’s powerful. And it’s a major reason why sites are adopting Persona.

Working everywhere is table-stakes. Priming users so they’re ready to log in with just a couple of clicks, that’s the winning hand.

beautiful native user-agent implementations sweetens the pot

Meanwhile, the Persona protocol is specifically tailored to be mediated by the user’s browser. Long-term, we think this will be a fantastic asset for the Persona login experience. Beautiful, device-specific UIs. Universal logout buttons. Innovation in trusted UIs. And lots of other tricks we haven’t even thought of yet. We’re doing just that kind of innovation on Firefox OS with a built-in trusted UI for Persona.

But let’s be clear: that’s not an adoption strategy. An optimized Firefox UI for Persona will not affect web-site adoption because it does nothing to reduce login friction. In a while, once Persona is widespread with hundreds of thousands of web sites supporting it, and users are actively logging in with Persona on many devices and browsers, Firefox’s optimized Persona UI will be a competitive advantage that other browsers will feel pressure to match. Until then, web site adoption is the only thing that matters.

now you know our priorities

Wherever it makes sense, we’re implementing Firefox-specific Persona UIs. However, when it comes to an adoption strategy, we know from our customers that this won’t help. What will help is:

Persona working everywhere

As many users as possible primed to log in

Those are our priorities.

We know this is different for Mozilla. But it’s quite common for folks implementing Services. What you’re seeing here is Mozilla adapting as it applies its strongly held principle of user sovereignty up the stack and into the cloud.

There’s a new blog post with some criticism of Mozilla Persona, the easy and secure web login solution that my team works on. The great thing about working in the open at Mozilla is that we get this kind of criticism openly, and we respond to it openly, too.

The author’s central complaint is that the Persona brand is visible to the user:

It [Persona] needs white-labeling. I know that branding drives adoption, but showing the Persona name on the login box at all is too much; it needs to be transparent for the user. Most of the visits to any website are first-time visits, which means the user is seeing your site/brand for the first time. Introducing another brand at the sign-up point is a confusing distraction to the user.

The author compares Persona to Stripe, the payment company with a super-easy-to-use JavaScript API, which lets a web site display a payment form with no trace of the Stripe brand, and all the hard credit-card processing work is left to the Stripe service.

This is an interesting point, but unfortunately it is wrong for an Identity solution. Consider if Persona were fully white-labeled, integrated into the web site’s own pages, with no trace of the Persona system visible to the user. What happens then? Two possibilities:

no user state is shared between sites: users create a new account on every site that uses Persona. The site doesn’t have to do the hard work of password storage, it can let Persona handle this. There’s no benefit to the user: every web site looks independent from the others, with its own account and password. And while this is incrementally better than having web sites store passwords themselves, that increment is quite small: web sites tend to use federated authentication solutions if they can lower the friction of users signing up. If users still have to create accounts everywhere, friction is high, and the benefit to the web site is small.

user state is shared between sites: users don’t have to create new accounts at every web site, they can use their existing single Persona account, but now they have no branding whatsoever to indicate this. So, are users supposed to type in the same Persona password on every site they see? Are they supposed to feel good about seeing their list of identities embedded within a brand new site they’ve never seen before, with no indication of why that data is already there? This is a recipe for disastrous phishing and a deeply jarring user experience.

So what about Stripe? With Stripe, the user retypes their credit-card number at every web site they visit. That makes sense because the hard part of payment processing for web sites isn’t so much the prompting for a credit card, it’s the actual payment processing in the backend. And, frankly, it would be quite jarring if you saw your credit card number just show up on a brand new web site you’ve never visited before.

But identity is different. The hard part is not the backend processing, it’s getting the user to sign up in the first place, and for that you really want the user to not have to create yet another account. Plus, if you’re going to surface the user’s identity across sites, then you *have* to give them an indication of the system that’s helping them do that so they know what password to type in and why their data is already there. And that’s Persona. Built to provide clear benefits to users and sites.

By the way, though we need some consistent Persona branding to make a successful user experience, we don’t need the Persona brand to be overbearing. Already, with Persona, web sites can add a prominent logo of their choosing to the Persona login screen. And we’re working on new approaches that would give sites even more control over the branding, while giving users just the hint they need to understand that this is the same login system they trust everywhere else. Check it out.

I’ve seen most of Zero Dark Thirty, the movie that claims to tell the story of the search for and killing of Bin Laden. It’s a pretty gruesome film, with clear implications that torture led to information that led us to Bin Laden. There are fierce debates about whether that fact – that torture led us to Bin Laden – is true or not. Almost every time torture is discussed, the discussion quickly shifts to one side saying “see, it’s effective!” and the other saying “it doesn’t even work!”

Here’s a simple question I don’t hear asked all that often: who cares if it works? It’s simply wrong. If “it works!” is our only criteria, then forget the Rule of Law. Many lives would be saved if police could willy-nilly enter anyone’s home and search their belongings, because some of those folks are probably murderers that we can’t catch if we strictly follow the rules. We could have captured all of Bin Laden’s extended family and tortured them, publicly threatening him to surrender. That might have worked. Especially if we did it to his kids. Especially the young ones.

What is wrong with the world when we even consider this most extreme version of the ends justifying the means?